34. Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Four
Silas
I ’m woken up by stomach cramps, a serious need to pee, and an even more serious need to puke. I open my eyes and groan when I realize I spent the night on the floor again, which is not a good sign. Jackie is gonna be pissed. And I don’t want her to be pissed: I already feel bad about the fight we had last night. Our second one in two days. And yeah, she had no right to go through my bag, but I was a dick for trashing every last cookie she probably spent the entire afternoon baking. Also, for coming back wasted in the middle of the night. And passing out like a full-fledged wino on the kitchen floor.
I sit up, and my stomach tightens in protest.
Fun fact: drinking large amounts of mouthwash will give you the worst kind of stomach cramps. And make you as nauseous as the morning after your first high school bender. Still, I’m surprised it’s this bad. This is far from my first rodeo; I thought my body would be acclimatized by now.
I don’t see any sign of Jackie, so that’s one good thing. I need time to pull myself together before I’m ready to face her.
I stumble the few feet to the bathroom and puke my guts out, then take a leak—no easy feat, given that the bathroom is the size of a postage stamp, and that I’m still unsteady on my feet.
So that’s two issues taken care of. The stomach cramps are still just as bad, though. I rifle quickly through the medicine cabinet because I know there’s a bottle of Pepto Bismol there. Like I said: not my first rodeo .
I find the bottle and twist the cap off, then take a few gulps. It’s never helped with the cramps in the past, but I’m an eternal optimist, among other things, so I even take an extra couple of swigs for good measure.
I’m still feeling a little… delicate, so I fall onto the couch instead of fixing myself a cup of coffee. A few more minutes of just sitting and I’m sure I’ll be good to go. Well, maybe not good to go. But hopefully okay to go, at least.
I glance up at the microwave: it’s almost ten-fifteen. And still no sign of Jax, which is weird because I thought she said she wanted to get on the road by nine.
A few minutes later, I hear her voice outside. And a man’s voice. Probably another one of the vendors. I get up and pour myself a glass of water, then collapse back onto the couch, because apparently this is the extent of physical exertion my body is capable of right now.
I’m just taking my second sip of water when the door opens. Only it isn’t Jackie who walks in.
It’s the Doc. Richard fucking Pemrose.
He looks like he’s expecting the confused-as-fuck expression on my face. Then again, he always looks calm. You could set a pack of wild baboons on him, and he’d still have that same serene expression on his face, like “Oh my, what a surprise. Do let me know if there’s anything I can do to make this barbaric attack more comfortable for you…”.
And then another man steps through the door and comes over to stand beside him. The guy is huge. Like bouncer huge. Bald head, no neck, all muscle. The two of them take up the entire living space.
“Silas,” the Doc nods. “I’m sorry if we took you by surprise.”
Except, it’s obvious that they meant to take me by surprise. He and the beefcake are here for a reason. And that reason is me.
I push myself up—because you don’t want to be the guy still sitting when you’re about to be accosted for something. One of the many useful lessons I learned in juvie.
The big dude takes a step closer, like he’s bracing for me to make a run for it. I peer over his shoulder, but I can’t see anyone else there. I know I heard Jax’s voice a second ago, but there’s no sign of her now .
“What’s going on?” I ask, my eyes sliding from the Doc, to Mr. Clean, then back to the Doc.
Richard lets out a sigh and gives me one of those close-lipped smiles that means, “I’m sorry for what I’m about to do, but I’m going to do it, anyway.”
That one I learned from well-meaning social workers back in the days before they all started to look at me with disdain.
“I’m here because we’re concerned about you, Silas. About some things you may be dealing with.”
My eyes dart to the door. “Did Jackie call you about something?”
“She’s worried about you, Silas. We all are.”
Jackie ratted me out…
About the liquor in my backpack… About the times I’ve come back wasted. Maybe other stuff, too. Only I can’t think what, right now.
Richard motions to Mister Muscle. “This is Aubrey. He works at Henderson House—an alcohol addiction center for teens that—”
“A fucking rehab center? ”
“I’ve secured a spot for you in their treatment center, yes. Just outside Springfield, so you’ll be close to home. I think it will—”
“What the hell did Jackie tell you? That I’m a fucking alcoholic? Is that what she said?”
I crane my neck to peer over his shoulder again, because I know she’s out there and I need to ask her what the hell is going on. But Beefcake—sorry: Aubrey … blocks me again.
“Jackie cares about you,” Richard says. “She’s worried about you. And she wants you to get the help that you need.”
“I don’t need help,” I snap. “So thank you for the intervention, or whatever this is. But I’m not going to a fucking rehab center . ”
Surely to God they must have found a group home by now, at least, that I can park my ass in until I turn eighteen. So I can leave Jackie to do the rest of her misguided cookie-sales trip on her own and get these goons off my back. Everyone gets what they want, and I stay out of Trenton.
And out of rehab .
“I’ll go back to Allerston Lake,” I tell them. “Take me back and I’ll check in with my PO, and I’ll go to a group home or wherever they tell me.”
“You need help,” Richard answers. “None of those options will get you the help that you need right now.”
“With all due respect, Doc, a few FaceTime calls don’t give you free rein to decide what kind of help I need.”
Richard just gives me that same thin-lipped smile. Like he actually feels sorry for me. Which makes me even more livid. This guy totally played me. He lured me into disclosing stuff to him, so he could slap me with a label and ship me off to some rehab center, away from his precious adopted daughter.
And she’s no better. In fact, Jackie is worse: making shit up about me just because I came home drunk a few times. After she acted like she cared about me and like there was actually something between us, beyond her just wanting to fix me.
“Can you answer a couple of questions for me, Silas?” Wreck-it-Ralph asks.
Aubrey. The oversized oaf who probably spends hours in the gym beefing up every day just to compensate for the fact that his parents saddled him with a girl’s name.
“Do you find you usually need a few drinks in order to get to sleep?”
I hold his stare for a few beats. I don’t answer, but he carries on like I did. Like he already knows what my answer is.
“Do you think about alcohol a lot? When you know you’ll be in a situation where it might be hard to get access to it?”
We go through the same stare-down routine.
“Did you try staying away from alcohol at any point and find that it’s almost impossible to do? And that it affects you physically? Like maybe you get the shakes? Or you sweat a lot or get stomach cramps? Or do you sometimes—”
“This is bullshit.” I slam my glass on the table and water splashes onto one of the guidebooks I must have left out yesterday. I move toward the door, only Aubrey takes a step sideways to block my path. We have another stare-down, except this one is charged and confrontational. This one is him communicating that I’m not going anywhere right now without the two of them—that he’s here to do more than pepper me with questions about my drinking habits.
Richard is the messenger, and Aubrey is the enforcer.
And Jackie, obviously, is the snitch.
The traitor.
And I’m the idiot, because I honestly didn’t see this one coming. I thought I could trust her. Even though we had a couple of blowouts, I actually believed that over the past few weeks, we’d moved past just being two people who shared a shitty past or a childhood friendship or whatever. And I sure as hell never expected her to turn on me like this. Not when her biggest mission this whole road trip has been to make me happy. She’s been driven to find a way to bring me the same level of peace or joy or whatever it is she managed to find since our parents’ deaths. And I swear I could actually feel how much she wanted that for me, that time we fell asleep together by the fire, or when she saw how the nightmares affected me, or when she looked over at me before jumping off the cliff into the water at that old quarry in Vermont. And the fact that I realize now I was wrong all those times makes me feel even more betrayed.
I really, really liked her. I actually thought about us staying together, once we got back home—even though we live almost an hour apart and go to different schools and have different lives. I thought we could make this thing work. I thought, after telling her the truth about what I’d done and the way she forgave me and the fact that it seemed to actually bring us closer together, that she would find a way to see past my other weaknesses and all my other faults.
Instead, she just went and used them against me.